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Growing Trend Of Software Piracy In Third World Countries, Open Source As The Only Solution

Piracy has been a big dilemma in third world countries and Pakistan is not short of Piracy by any means. In 2008, software piracy rate in Pakistan was around 86% and the commercial value of unlicensed software in Pakistan was 278 million US dollars. Now in 2017, installations of unlicensed software on personal computers (PC) in Pakistan fell by 6 percent i.e. from 86% to 80% per cent but still commercial value of this illegal software activity amounted to $261.32 million. The most common way people in developing economies engage in software piracy is to buy a single legal copy of a program and then install it on multiple computers. This year’s survey also found that one per cent of business decision-makers in developing markets believed that this is a legal practice.

There is almost no check on selling pirated software in our markets. Reason of this Piracy in Pakistan is that: In emerging countries like Pakistan, end users cannot afford genuine software as the original price of the software might be equal to their one month’s salary. What companies need to realize that they cannot charge the same amount in every part of the world, what they would be in the United States because in most places, it is just not something people can spend their salaries upon.

Vendor companies have not worked on analysis of individual countries including economic conditions and purchase power of the end user. Technology and software are now a days like food and drinks which means they are essential for humans. But when vendors carries out same prices around the globe without considering purchasing power of different areas then obvious result would come in the shape of Piracy. Piracy may be directly stealing from the company that created the content, but there is no denying the fact that it becomes legal and of a necessity when it costs more for most people to actually buy it than run their homes.

That is why it becomes practice to use pirated software and piracy is no more treated as illegal by the consumers as well as small and medium size business organization also Government has failed to implement the sufficient actions against piracy. The issue of reducing software piracy has much broader implication for a developing economy such as Pakistan. By reducing software piracy, government cannot only increase employment and tax revenues, but can also stimulate the local IT industry by ensuring IT entrepreneurs are rewarded for their efforts.
In third world countries , you will find Pirated software in Educational and IT Institutions too where you will find students are getting trained on Pirated software, even major software vendors ignore these practices deliberately even some of them themselves promote pirated software in third world countries in order to have skilled professionals those will further promote their products and services in organization where they will be employed however whenever a business organization flourish, these vendors impose restrictions and carries crackdown on the organizations with the help of the government agencies and force them to buy their software.

Ever since the dawn of commercial software, piracy has been a problem without a realistic solution that meets the needs of both the software vendor and the end user. From serial keys to outright DRM (digital rights management) schemes, the software industry has left no preventive measure untried.

Some software companies by contrast, have opted to step out of the DRM minefield altogether as it was a perceived irritation to their customers.

Due to the overall negative reaction from many end users with regard to DRM, a number of open source advocates have pointed out that if software companies simply adopted one of the many open source licenses, the need to concern themselves with anti-piracy efforts becomes completely unneeded.